LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance) (3 page)

CHAPTER THREE

T
rinidad Cervantes knew everyone and everything that happened in the Rio Grande Valley, but Jeanette wondered if Columbia’s old foreman could help her track down the elusive Frenchman, Kitt.

Trinidad was a dried-up, wizened little man with a monkey face and agile bowed legs; he always insisted that his growth had been stunted when he was a jockey by the horse trainers putting him on too light a diet and burying him up to his
neck in the manure box for too long a time. After that, her father’s offer to oversee Columbia had seemed to the little man like a miracle from St. Jude.

It was true that Trinidad could neither read nor write, nor did he know a note of music, but many a s
o-called educated white man envied him his accomplishments. He spoke both Spanish and English fluently and played the violin like a virtuoso. He made beautiful rings and bangles out of tortoiseshell with only his pocket knife, a round stick, and a pot of hot water for his tools. He also made fancy ropes for bridle reins and girths out of horsehair. But it was his gentle love and concern, which her stern father had been unable to demonstrate, that endeared Trinidad to Jeanette.

Trinidad had cousins and niece
s and nephews in all the villas strung along the Rio Grande line like glass beads on a necklace. If anyone could elicit a piece of information, he could. Yet she had been riding with the leathery brown old man since sunup and had uncovered nothing about the Frenchman.

She had reasoned that perhaps the Frenchman was running contraband in one of the small ships of light draft that could operate in the shallow coastal waters where ships of the line could not venture. Perhaps, as a few other blockade runners di
d, he sailed into one of the inland waterways or even slipped in over the bar at the mouth of the Rio Grande, and transferred his contraband to lighters, large, open barges.

Working their way down the river toward the coast, she and Trinidad stopped before
every adobe
jacale
to question the inhabitants about the Frenchman. The sun, an orange- hot coal, now rode high in the blue-white sky, and she was tired and her thighs were sweaty in the boy’s dungarees. Yet she said nothing to Trinidad of her parched throat or muscle-sore derriere, for he had wholly disapproved of what she had in mind.

“
Eet ees bad enough that you must dress and ride like un
muchacho
,” he reproved her in that avuncular way he had used on her since she was three and old enough to sit astride a horse. But she had not ridden horseback since she went off to the finishing school at twelve, and she was dearly paying for it now. That she straddled a scurvy burro, a jenny, did not help.

Trinidad continued his diatribe, unaware that she had reined
up her burro and was no longer following him. “But thees mission you are on—
híjole
,
sobrina
,” he said, using the Spanish equivalent for niece, “eet could land you en the calaboose. And whachaya think, if the
Yanquis
catch you, they hang you for a traitor.” He snapped his horny fingers. “
Muy pronto
, no?”

Jeanette drew off her floppy hat and let the long braid she had tucked into the crown fall between her shoulder blades. She turned her face to the treeless shoreline, hoping to catch some of the breeze that
was nudging the tide’s waves toward the beach. But the wind playfully hovered just off the sultry coast. Overhead a flock of curlews wheeled. With the back of her arm she shielded her eyes against the sunlight that glared off the white sand and watched the curlews’ arrowhead formation with distracted interest. “Trini,” she mused, “maybe this Kitt—maybe he doesn’t operate off the coast at all. Maybe he operates from right there out of Fort Brown.”

Trinidad heeled his burro about and loped up alongside the yo
ung woman he loved as much as his own eleven children. “One of the soldados, eh?”

Jeanette began to fan the soiled hat before her face. “
No,” she said slowly, “I’m sure I would have recognized him among the soldiers I danced with. His face would have betrayed his strength of leadership, his cunning, his bravery in serving a noble cause.”

Trinidad guffawed and slapped his bony knee. “
You,
mi
sobrina
,
ees una romantica
—and a leetle bit loco, no?” She sighed and smiled wistfully. “Yes, I daresay I am. This Kitt is probably all Cristobal says he is. A crude rascal out for his own profit.”

In the village of Bagdad on the Mexican side of the border Jeanette
’s search was finally rewarded with a clue. She should have deduced that since Bagdad was a neutral port it would be simple to bring cotton across the river from Texas and load it on one of the vessels anchored in Bagdad’s harbor. The Federal blockaders could not intervene until the ships cruised outside the territorial limits.

Situated between a stretch of sand dunes, Bagdad
’s flat beach fronted the Gulf of Mexico. The village of fishermen’s board shanties offered tolerable anchorage and harbor facilities for the growing number of vessels—now a dozen or more—that were participating in the dangerous occupation of shipping Confederate cotton.

Beneath her hat
’s floppy brim Jeanette’s eyes swept uneasily from one side of the dirt street to the other. Saloons and bars jostled for elbow space with homes whose pastel paint was peeled off mud-brick walls by the sun and wind and salt. Apparently she was not the only one with the idea of transporting cotton to the Mexican port. The dusty streets were rife with men—Mexican teamsters, cotton buyers, cotton sellers, speculators, peddlers, foreigners.

Their clothing, hair, and beards were saturated with so much dust that they looked like millers, and the horses and mules shook their heads to throw the dust out of their ears.

Although the sun was still high, balancing atop the spire of the unfinished cathedral, people were spilling out the swinging doors of a crowded cantina when Trinidad roped in his burro. The painted placard over the cantina’s door announced:
la fonda del olvido
, the Inn of Forgetfulness.

“
Enchanting,” Jeanette said.

“
You weel wait here.”

“
No.” She slid a leg over the burro’s scraggy back and hopped down. “Now is as good a time as any to put my masquerade to the test.”

“
Dios mio
,” the old foreman groaned, shaking his sombreroed head. “I should have told your
padre
every time you crept out your bedroom window.”

“
Using the trellis as a ladder,” she recalled, “and scouring the countryside at night with Cristobal and Armand.”

“
Pues
, a few well-placed whacks—”

“
No, it would not have changed the girl. Only made me more rebellious and obstinate than I already was.”

Sawdust sprinkled the hardwood floor of the smoke-filled cantina. A brass rail was flanked by ornate cuspidors and the mahogany bar was banked with customer
s—businessmen, soldiers from Fort Brown, drifters, and gaily painted girls whose attributes spilled over their low-cut, black-laced necklines. Jeanette hunched her shoulders so that the buckskin shirt hung loosely, concealing the small breasts. She jammed her pale, delicate hands in her pants pockets, assuming a masculine stance.

“
Hey,
paisano
," a mustachioed monte dealer called to Trinidad. “No
muchachos
in the place.”

Jeanette shifted to the other foot and braced her mouth in a sinister mug. She was caref
ul to keep her hat’s brim shadowing her blue eyes, though many a Spanish conquistador had left blue-eyed, fair-haired descendants. “I’m not a boy,” she gruffly told the dealer in her best Spanish.

Trinidad winked broadly. “
I have brought my nephew for—some experience.”

Nearby the men who girded a green-baized table mounded with silver dollars and gold pieces chuckled and elbowed one another. “
Ahhh, yes,” the dealer grinned. “Perhaps Maria or Hermosita?”

“
No, no,” Trinidad said. “She must be young. Rubia— is she still here?”

The dealer jerked his head toward the stairs. “
She has a select clientele,
paisano
. But you can try your luck.”

The stairs creaked beneath Jeanette
’s boots. A threadbare runner showed the way down a dimly lit, seedy-looking hallway. From below drifted the American hoedown, “Little Brown Jug,” banged out on a tinny piano. Trinidad stopped before the third door on the left and knocked. “Rubia, it is Tio Trinidad.”

Jeanette sighed. Another niece.

“One of my sons knows Rubia,” Trinidad explained baldly before the door parted to admit them.

Jeanette took one look about her at the gilded mirrors, the velvet draperies, and the painting of the nude woman partially shielded by a boa fan, and decided that in comparison similar places in New Orleans m
ust look like Methodist meeting halls. Such ornate trappings in such a claptrap establishment!

And such a woman who turned from the oval mirror to face her! Jeanette judged the woman, dressed in a demure gown of dove-gray muslin with a high white collar, t
o be twenty-one or -two. Her golden-skinned face was devoid of makeup, her lips soft, her pale hazel eyes vibrant against the honey-blonde hair that clouded her shoulders.

Rubia
, Spanish for blond. And to think this regal creature of undoubted Spanish heritage was a lady of the night!

The young woman set down the ivory-backed brush and smiled. “
Tio, como esta? Y que pasa por sus hijos
?”

Raised among the
campesinos
and, of course, with Cristobal as a friend, Jeanette easily followed the conversation in Spanish. She had to repress a smile when the young woman reproved Trinidad for bringing the slim, callow youth to her. But Trinidad, removing the sombrero from his grizzled head, replied, “It is not for that we come, Rubia. We come for information. We look for a man—
un francees, se llama
Kitt."

The face, like a beautiful flower at sunset, closed over. Jeanette
’s heart leapt. The young woman knew something!

Rubia took u
p the brush and began toying with her curls. "
Por que
? ’'

“
You have heard of him?” Jeanette asked, unable to constrain her excitement. “You know him?”

Rubia
’s pale-eyed gaze moved up and down Jeanette’s disreputable-looking person. Her lids narrowed. “Who is the boy?”

“
Another of my brother’s
sobrinos
. He will say nothing.”

“
And I can tell you nothing—until you tell me why,
tio
, you wish to find this
hombre
, this Frenchman, Kitt.”

Trinidad turned the sombrero in his hands and recreased the high crown. He f
lashed Jeanette a furtive look. “We are in need of someone to transport certain cargo.”

Rubia nodded her head. For a moment she tapped the brush lightly on the dressing table
’s tiled top. Jeanette held her breath. To come so close to finding the mysterious and elusive Kitt . . .

Then, “
A water boy, Alejandro, may take you to Kitt— under certain conditions. You will most likely find Alejandro pushing his cart along the oceanfront,
tio
."

Thirty minutes later Jeanette sighted a little Mexican
aguatero
trudging along the hard-packed sand behind an ox cart loaded with water barrels. With Trinidad close at her heels, she threaded her way between the kegs, boxes, and bales of tobacco, cotton, and hides waiting to board the few ships, mostly English merchants that sat three miles out in the Mexican harbor.

Alejandro, who could have been no more than eleven or twelve, possessed angelic, bird-bright eyes. From his dirt-smeared, cherubic mouth drooped a cigarette butt. Trinidad explained what they wanted, and the urchin
flipped the butt out on the sand. "
Si
,” the boy replied indifferently, as if it were of little consequence to take them to the famous or infamous blockade runner, depending on which side one was for. “Come back after sunset. We go then.”

For more than an
hour Trinidad and Jeanette, trying to look as churlish as the Mexican water boy, sat in a sleazy cantina that fronted a sea-rotted wharf while they waited for night to pull its blanket over Bagdad. By the time they left she was more than a little dizzy from the smoke and the noxious fumes of the
pulque
and mescal that lay like a fog over the cantina.

She found she was to grow even more dizzy a short time later, for Alejandro informed the two of them that once they boarded a lighter, he would have to blindfo
ld them. She was slightly taller than Alejandro, but when he started to knot the smelly bandanna about her eyes, she could see his disgust at dealing with such a sissy-looking boy. Beneath the floppy brim of her hat she glared back at him. What would a boy have done in similar circumstances? “
Caramba, mono
!” she cursed gruffly, calling him a monkey. “I could tie the thing better and faster myself!”